Re: Opinions Wanted: 4GL or New Era??

Dan, Take a look at Power-4gl at "http://www.rl.is/~john/pow4gl.html";. You can download a shareware version which includes a simple demo application. The package provides new user-interface objects for Informix-4gl, including vertical menus, powerful pick-lists, onscreen scrollable reports and help windows. The basic idea being to approach GUI power for your dumb terminals and old PC's. Take a look at the web pages and contact me for more information. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- John H. Frantz Power-4gl: Extending Informix-4gl frantz@centrum.is http://www.rl.is/~john/pow4gl.html In article <33DD3BF8.1C23@clp.com>, Dan Cradler <dcradler@clp.com> wrote: > > We are going to rewrite a custom Foxbase for Unix application because we > have outgrown its capabilities. We want to use Informix Workgroup Server > as our database engine since we are also getting accounting and payroll > software that runs on it. Our custom application runs on dumb terminals > (mostly VT 525 and other VT compatibles). We plan to stick with the > terminals since they are cost-effective, reliable, and efficient for our > purposes. What we are trying to figure out is which Informix (or 3rd > party) tool would be the best for this task. It appears that our options > are: 4GL, New Era with character VCL, and ESQL for C. Is anybody else > writing new code for terminals? What do you reccommend? So far, we are > unimpressed with 4GL's screen handling abilities (no way to make > pull-down menus, no arbitrary placement of text on the screen, no way to > get single keystrokes to make your own menus, etc.). Is there something > we are missing or a third-party tool that removes these limitations? New Pull-down menus can be done by Power-4gl. Arbitrary text on the screen can be done by "display at". Single keystrokes can be trapped - Power-4gl provides this along with keystroke naming, i.e. "help" instead of "f1". > Era looks much nicer but so far we haven't found anyone that uses the > character VCL. Has anyone tried it? Can you design effective screens > with it for use on terminals? If we choose ESQL, is there a good screen > handling library out there (better than curses) that would work well > with it? > > Thanks > > Dan Cradler > dcradler@clp.com -------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====----------------------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet